About Walker Percy: Artist, Philosopher, Scientist


Who is Walker Percy? | A Brief Biography | Important Dates



A FIRST PERCY QUOTE
The Strange Case of the Self, your self, the Ghost which Haunts the Cosmos...Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos--novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes--you are beyond doubt the strangest?

--from the Preface to Lost in the Cosmos


Image: A Casual Photograph of the Novelist


How does Percy speak to us? Perhaps it is because of his ever-vigilant insight into the widespread ambiguity and inconsistency of the modern scientific era. Indeed, his peculiar knack for being able to speak to the individual in an age of "abstraction" is all the more poignant when we consider how artfully he expresses himself through his chosen medium of fiction.

On a philosophical/moral level, Percy might readily be compared to Kierkegaard the Danish existentialist or the important American moralist Ralph Waldo Emerson; on a scientific level, he might be compared with Copernicus or perhaps Freud for his revolutionary perspective on the human place in the cosmos relative to his language theory; while on an artistic level, he might equally compare well with Dostoyevsky or T.S. Eliot for the sensitivity of his vision and the poetic way in which he creates his fiction.

All combined, Percy reveals himself a kind of "post-modern" Da Vinci, but using the American South as his canvas and drawing board rather than Renaissance Italy. Sketching human drama, faithful to the tragic and comedic alike, with the best of human thought and art behind it...

Walker Percy:
An Interactive-Allegorical Portrait

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This page last updated 7 February 1998.
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